“Sometimes our most important discussions occur in the woods, or off site, certainly not on T.V. or social media. Note to self. Talk that is uncensored, unrecorded, imbibed rather than remembered verbatim, uttered between trees, dogs and boulders & the proverbial lamp post, soon to be reabsorbed into the collective unconscious. Truly “old school”, in the best sense, spent with the fleeting currency of cash, as opposed to digital credit stored on a phone, monitored by Big Brother. We climbed to the gnome area, flanked by Soul, and Allis, dogs but none-the-less our high value partners. A place we call “The Grand Canyon”, although in Arizona, this might be called out, as a misnomer. Who cares. For all practical purposes, this is our grand canyon. We inhabit its pathways & crevices, along with bears, and fox, or anyone small enough to crawl through a hole. Nature weeds out the unfit, the oblivious, the bourgeois. Or those without will power. Although it’s gotten me into many jams, I wouldn’t stop being oppositional. I won’t ever stop seeking forgotten realms. Not while still in a body, and able to sense, with my nose, the places gone missing, yet decidedly, still a part of Vermont. I’d rather do that, on a weekend, than dive into screen life, though I do have an active screen life, don’t get me wrong. I love to explore the cyber world, I just don’t forget, the dirty, ordinary things all around me, that seem to radiate divinity. It’s a ping pong existence. Having scrambled for an hour looking for the lid of a paint can, this morning, and not finding it, how glad I was that the Benjamin Moore paint store had tracked my every move and decision, back in the spring of 2022. The unassuming man with a comb over easily pulled up my two paint samples, and immediately identified “Rosy Blush” and the other color that had turned out to be a total heart throb & inspiration when applied to my furniture. They’d tracked the sale, and normally I’d be irked or offended. Sigh. Knowing when to let go, and let live, is such a tricky business. Walking out of the store, an F-16 or F-35 did a fly over, rendering all natural sound inert. For me, a transplant who chose Burlington in 1980, the changes have been deafening. It’s why I quickly moved out of town, and into the bush. I’ve been changing bushes, and brushes, and re-situating myself ever since. But, Vermont is still my turf. Come hell or high water. You have to take a stand, somewhere, I figure. And let friendship, and intelligence, and ingenuity, root in the earth. We won’t be here forever. Vermont is still more wild, than not. So why not settle into the best imperfection that is humanly possible. And traipse upwards, ever upwards, to meet the changing skies, with compassion and grace. Be they bombers, be they beavers. Be they small, deer trails into hunting grounds, or quiet byways, as sculpted by those who can still find those elusive gateways into a wider, unlimited landscape, the very landscapes our dreamy, intuitions demand, and can finally claim as real, or at worst, a cobbled way out.”
